If you are a UK developer looking to take advantage of cloud computing, but you haven’t yet taken the plunge, this free half-day of training is the quickest way to get up-to-speed with Microsoft’s offering; Windows Azure. We’ll take you from knowing nothing...

I’ll be covering how to set up ADFS 2.0 for authenticating to Windows Azure apps and Office 365. The talk is basically in 2 sections – integration with Windows Azure and integration with Office 365. So it’ll go: ADFS ==> App Fab ACS ==> Azure App...

As applications that are used by employees of large corporate enterprises start to work their way in to the cloud, it becomes obvious that a need to integrate the network and security infrastructures of both environments becomes important. I’ve made a...

Amazon, traditionally an IaaS cloud provider, has now introduced Beanstalk, a PaaS model for the cloud.  Their IaaS model has served them well: you provide a VM, they run it for you. To round out the model they provide additional services such as...

Whenever most of us think of OSS, we think in terms of a stack with Linux at the bottom, providing the OS platform and say PHP at the top with say a CMS app atop that. It’s often forgotten of course, that there’s a healthy and thriving community of developers...

The current SDK (1.3) and Tools for Visual Studio has been refreshed to 1.4. It’s mainly a stability release to address a few issues. Probably the nastiest bug-ette was the full IIS web role that recycled when the diagnostic store was full. The full bug...

What we need, in our dual-roles as both technologists and business-analysts, is a sort of kit bag of tools we can use to explain in simple, low-jargon, understandable language to say, the CIO or other C-level executive of a business, how a move to the...

The Mayor of London is an entertaining fellow. A regular on the TV news quiz “ Have I Got News For You ” (the clip is very funny…). Here he presents a Windows Phone 7 app using Windows Azure at the back end which allows Londoners to report grafitti, rubbish...

It used to be that unless you had an MSDN Universal or Premium subscription, you could only get 25 hours per month of Azure for free. That's certainly enough to test your apps out and get a feel for what it's all about. But now there is the new "extra...

Grains and Silos. Promises are resolved if they are either kept or broken. It’s a bit of an academic read (well, it is from Microsoft Research), but it shows some very interesting thinking and ways of approaching the classes of problems the cloud gives...

Tech Days is running again this year. 3 days of Cloud, Web, Client and Phone with tracks for both IT Pros and Developers. I’ll be presenting a few sessions, come up and say hello to me after a session, it’d be nice to put a few faces to the names of you...

I thought this was a very neat combination of mobile, cloud and more physical technologies (like a balloon!). You’ve heard of the idea of S+S and H+S+S (Hardware plus Software plus Services), normally restricted to things like say a runner’s GPS plus...

  Microsoft Research has made available for download a developer preview of its Windows Phone 7 + Cloud Services Software Development Kit (SDK). The new SDK is related to Project Hawaii, a mobile research initiative focusing on using the cloud to...

I’ve been offline for a little while looking after my wife who’s just had some serious surgery. But back on again now and I spotted this little thingy0ette I thought would interest folks.   The Register’s Cloud Channel.     Planky – GBR...